Lucas Gautier

Happiness can be found even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light.

[Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent @SecScottBessent]

More than a year ago, the House passed the Clarity Act.

There’s been progress since — thousands of hours of bipartisan negotiations took place at the staff and Member levels. The Senate Committees on Banking and Agriculture advanced their respective titles. And Senate Republicans produced a floor-ready product that, as I type this, is waiting for a vote.

It’s disappointing — but not surprising — that Senate Democrats are choosing politics on the cusp of a major victory for American leadership. Find another instance in history where Congress, when given the choice, opted to push an industry out of the United States rather than smartly regulate it. American Exceptionalism was once a bipartisan goal; if Clarity fails, I have serious doubts.

These same Democrats — many of whom have taken millions of dollars from the crypto industry — proclaim that Clarity lacks safeguards for consumers and falls short in countering illicit finance. Nothing could be further from the truth. Titles II and III materially uplift regulatory and compliance obligations for digital asset intermediaries, placing them on similar footing with traditional financial institutions. The Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act — which Washington lobbyists have spun up as a boogeyman for certain groups of prosecutors and law enforcement — does nothing other than codify longstanding Treasury Department policy that’s remained consistent across Administrations: non-custodial builders and developers are not, and have never been, subject to registration obligations under the Bank Secrecy Act. And at this point, major law enforcement trades that once opposed the bill, including the Fraternal Order of Police, have now endorsed it.

The Senate needs to vote NOW on this landmark legislation. The truth is that Senate Democrats are afraid to advance the Clarity Act as they fear Senator Warren and the “Anti-Crypto Army” she once promised to build. In the days ahead, Leader Thune will put this theory to the test. Will Senate Democrats be on the side of American Exceptionalism, or will they opt to cede American leadership of a global industry for fear of the bespectacled squirrel’s Left flank?

America will lead or America won’t. It’s not more complicated than that. I believe Satoshi once said it best:

“If you don’t believe me or don’t get it, I don’t have time to try to convince you, sorry.”

[JC Foster @forestmanjohn]

3 months ago, I quit my job to chase a dream: to build an affordable, convenient, plastic-free coffee maker.

Grateful for everyone who has reserved ❤️

https://t.co/jxDgAirVsd

[Saifedean Ammous @saifedean]

Starting this week, I’m releasing all the lectures from my Principles of Economics course for free! The first lecture explores economics as human action and choice under scarcity, purposeful behaviour, and why sound economics begins with understanding how people act.

[Michael Saylor @saylor]

Digital Credit is Digital Capital refined: strip the risk, damp the volatility, compress the duration, convert the currency, and extract the yield.

[DHH @dhh]

Microservices is the software industry’s most successful confidence scam. It convinces small teams that they are “thinking big” while systematically destroying their ability to move at all. It flatters ambition by weaponizing insecurity: if you’re not running a constellation of services, are you even a real company? Never mind that this architecture was invented to cope with organizational dysfunction at planetary scale. Now it’s being prescribed to teams that still share a Slack channel and a lunch table.

Small teams run on shared context. That is their superpower. Everyone can reason end-to-end. Everyone can change anything. Microservices vaporize that advantage on contact. They replace shared understanding with distributed ignorance. No one owns the whole anymore. Everyone owns a shard. The system becomes something that merely happens to the team, rather than something the team actively understands. This isn’t sophistication. It’s abdication.

Then comes the operational farce. Each service demands its own pipeline, secrets, alerts, metrics, dashboards, permissions, backups, and rituals of appeasement. You don’t “deploy” anymore—you synchronize a fleet. One bug now requires a multi-service autopsy. A feature release becomes a coordination exercise across artificial borders you invented for no reason. You didn’t simplify your system. You shattered it and called the debris “architecture.”

Microservices also lock incompetence in amber. You are forced to define APIs before you understand your own business. Guesses become contracts. Bad ideas become permanent dependencies. Every early mistake metastasizes through the network. In a monolith, wrong thinking is corrected with a refactor. In microservices, wrong thinking becomes infrastructure. You don’t just regret it—you host it, version it, and monitor it.

The claim that monoliths don’t scale is one of the dumbest lies in modern engineering folklore. What doesn’t scale is chaos. What doesn’t scale is process cosplay. What doesn’t scale is pretending you’re Netflix while shipping a glorified CRUD app. Monoliths scale just fine when teams have discipline, tests, and restraint. But restraint isn’t fashionable, and boring doesn’t make conference talks.

Microservices for small teams is not a technical mistake—it is a philosophical failure. It announces, loudly, that the team does not trust itself to understand its own system. It replaces accountability with protocol and momentum with middleware. You don’t get “future proofing.” You get permanent drag. And by the time you finally earn the scale that might justify this circus, your speed, your clarity, and your product instincts will already be gone.

[Strategy @Strategy]

17 years ago, at 2:10 pm EDT, Satoshi Nakamoto started a fire in cyberspace. Happy Bitcoin Whitepaper Day!

[jack @jack]

https://t.co/cz3yYon3SE

[Charlie Kirk @charliekirk11]

Jesus defeated death so you can live.

[Michael Saylor @saylor]

Never short a man who buys orange ink by the barrel.

[Gemini @Gemini]

PROOF OF RECORD

[Michael Saylor @saylor]

@1MarkMoss Borrow the money, buy the car, keep the #Bitcoin.

[Michael Saylor @saylor]

$MSTR to enter Nasdaq 100
https://t.co/kDtDxWTSbI

[Senator Cynthia Lummis @SenLummis]

America won the Space Race. Now America must win the Bitcoin Race.

[Michael Saylor @saylor]

Last week, $MSTR's treasury operations delivered a BTC Yield of 3.3%, providing a net benefit of approximately 13,270 BTC to shareholders, or around 1,896 BTC per day. At $98K per BTC, this equates to $1.3 billion for the week, or $186 million per day.

[Saifedean Ammous @saifedean]

What would the twentieth century have looked like on hard money?

This is the topic of my next book, and my first work of economic fiction:

The Gold Standard

Read the first four chapters and pre-order your copy now for delivery in March!

Links below!

RT to win a signed copy!

[The Babylon Bee @TheBabylonBee]

America Unburdens Itself From What Has Been https://t.co/MElsQSK1sE

[Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump]

I would like to wish our great Bitcoiners a Happy 16th Anniversary of Satoshi’s White Paper. We will end Kamala’s war on crypto, & Bitcoin will be MADE IN THE USA! VOTE TRUMP! #Bitcoin #FreeRossDayOne

[Lucas Gautier @Lucas_Gautier]

@_Nazy_ @SouthDallasFood Looks like Oaxaca cheese!